6/22/10
6/22/10
GENEVIEVE ALMOUZNI
Symposium Interview Series 2010
Executive Director of the Banbury Center at CSHL
Interview by Jan Witkowski
Geneviève Almouzni established her group at the Curie Institute (Paris, France), after a PhD from the University Pierre & Marie Curie (Paris) with Dr. M. Méchali at the Jacques Monod Institute (Paris, France), and a post-doctoral training at NIH (Bethesda, USA), Since 1999, she is Head of Department "Nuclear Dynamics and Genome Plasticity" at the Institut Curie (Paris, France), involved in coordinating networks of research within Cancéropôle (France) and at the European level concerning Epigenetics and is Head of Training Unit at the Institut Curie.
She has been interested into the interrelationships between nuclear organisation and the DNA metabolism, including DNA replication repair and transcription. The unifying theme underlying her work is the wish to understand the principles governing nuclear organization and functions. A key issue is how these events are coordinated in order to ensure the maintenance of a cellular identity throughout cell divisions. This is a central question for the field of Epigenetics. A special emphasis is given to developmental context and genotoxic stress to appreciate the importance of factors involved in chromatin dynamics (CAF-1, HIRA, ASF1, histone modifying enzymes). Her interest in the 3D organization of the cell nucleus is aimed at understanding how specific domains like pericentric heterochromatin can be stably maintained. The implications for pathological diseases like cancer are considered throughout the approaches.
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